View full sizeMotoya Nakamura/ The OregonianTitian's La Bella painting has been installed at the Portland Art Museum.

See how the Beauty looks.

The high blush of her cheeks, the golden necklace swooping down over her low neckline, the warm puff of her thick fur sleeves. Her eyes, frank and confident yet also turning modestly to the side. The hair that might have taken hours for some maidservant to arrange. Colors that pop but also blend -- blue and gold in her dress, rouge on her cheeks and lips, pale yellow-white on her bosom, browns and oranges to give her brighter colors a more brilliant glow. Her face, with the becoming roundness of her jaw and chin, is an almost perfect oval. Her eyebrows are slicing arches. Her forehead, pale as powder, has a slight bulge of implied intelligence.

After nearly half a millennium, "La Bella" -- or "that portrait of that woman in the blue dress," as the Duke of Urbino referred to her in a 1536 letter urging that her creator, the celebrated painter Titian, hurry up and finish her for delivery -- still exudes serenity and extraordinary class.

After a lifetime in Italy (except for 15 years at the Louvre in Paris, where she was taken in 1800 as booty from the Napoleonic Wars), she's crossed the ocean from her luxuriant quarters in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence for a brief tour.

If you go: Titian's "La Bella"

What: 1536 portrait of an unknown woman by the master Venetian painter Titian, on loan from the Galleria Palatina at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence

Admission: $15 general; $12 seniors 55 and older, and students 18 and older; free for members and children 17 and younger

About Titian: Tiziano Vecelli, born circa 1488-90, died in 1576. A Renaissance master who moved easily among subject matters, he was celebrated for his portraits and his mastery of color and motion. Portland Art Museum Director Brian J. Ferriso: "He was known as a very early precursor to the Impressionists in terms of his ability to push the paint."

Following stops at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, she's taken up lodging through Jan. 29 at the Portland Art Museum, in a second-floor gallery that is ordinarily given over to the display of ancient and classical objects and art.

The woman in the blue dress brings with her, besides her great and enduring beauty, some intriguing puzzles: Who was she? What does she have to say about shifting values and power during the Renaissance? How has she survived for so long in such good shape? As an undisputed masterwork of portraiture, how does she reflect the way we perceive other people and ourselves? And is she real, or is she Memorex? Who was she?

Last Friday, on the afternoon of the exhibition's opening day, a modest but steady flow of visitors ventured up the stairs and through the European galleries to the small room that contains nothing but "La Bella" in a gilded frame against a backdrop of royal-purple drapery, a large wall label that provides some basic background information, and a bench to sit on while contemplating the painting. A museum guard, relaxed but alert, stood next to the painting. Most of the room was twilight-dark. Lights from above were focused warmly on that singular sensation, the Beauty's face.

In the 16th century or the 21st, La Bella is beautiful. For many visitors, that will be enough. For historians and other scholars, who want to know everything about the past and are dauntingly aware that much, probably most, of it will forever be a mystery, the stakes seem higher.

Because she is a masterwork by an important artist from an important time and place, Titian's unidentified Beauty holds a certain small but significant standing in the story of how human beings think about what we look like and who we are. She has high standing in the history of portraiture, a fairly codified form of painting that is a contract between artist and subject: I will pose for you; you will make me look good. More broadly, she gives clues to what we think "beauty" means, and to the many expressions, from culturally stylized to physical to psychological, that artists give to the idea of human essence.

To begin, no one's sure who La Bella is. One of the unusual things about this painting is that the history of its ownership, upkeep and travels is scrupulously documented. But the model's identity has been elusive, the subject of educated and fanciful guesses. Some historians think she's an idealized portrait of the wife of her original owner, Francesco Maria I della Rovere, duke of Urbino. At one point she was assumed to be Titian's mistress, with no particular evidence to support the idea. Some people believe she never existed in the flesh -- only as an ideal of beauty in Titian's mind.

What seems close to certain is that Titian used this model, or this invented idea of beauty, in several paintings. The face of "La Bella" is also recognizable in his famous reclining nude, "Venus of Urbino," at the Uffizi in Florence, from 1538; in the bare-shouldered and bare-breasted "Woman in a Fur Coat," at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, from 1536; and in the same year's "Woman With a Plumed Hat," at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The truth may be that the model actually existed, and that Titian "improved" her, something in the way modern fashion photographers flatter their subjects.

"Is it a real person, or is it an ideal of beauty?" the Portland museum's director, Brian J. Ferriso, asks rhetorically. "We've come down, I think the art historians have come down -- it's somewhere in between."

True or not, that idea makes sense. All artistic depictions of human beings, even so-called documentary images, are fictions. The sitter sits, but the artist interprets. It's easy to see the stretching of truth in a Picasso Cubist painting and much harder in, say, the gritty portraits by photographer Walker Evans of realistically stark Depression-era faces. But Evans chose the framing, lighting and exposure: In the end, although working closely with what his subjects had to offer, he still created their images.

So did Titian create La Bella. Most likely he idealized his model, reaching through her for his own concept of beauty. Titian was a man of the High Renaissance. And Renaissance Europe, in the melting stages of the slow thaw of the Middle Ages and their brute realities, was ripe for fresh ideals. A shifting culture

From roughly the fall of Rome to the dawning of the Renaissance, European art was sifted through the filter of the Church. The Church paid for the art, and the artists created what the Church wanted. So painters who wanted to celebrate, for instance, the female form were free to do so, but in a religious context.

Titian, born somewhere between 1488 and 1490, entered a different world. The Church continued to be an important patron, but it was no longer the only game in town. Much of what sparked Europe's slow but revolutionary transformation was the rise of the nobility and the urban merchant class. Power was shifting and broadening, although from a contemporary perspective it still existed in the hands of a select few -- the 1 percent of its time.

"La Bella" is a product of the new order's new patronage. Whoever the model was, Titian didn't need to turn her into a Magdalene or Madonna. He presented her as a member of the wealthy secular elite. Her lush fashionista look denotes a woman of culture, leisure, privilege. Even her robust fleshiness -- not fat, but comfortable amplitude -- suggests the values of her place and position: To carry a few extra pounds in a time of relative scarcity was a matter of ideal beauty. Compare her figure to the extreme skinniness of today's fashion models, at a time of relative if poorly distributed plenty; or to Cleopatra's plow-horse physique in the Portland museum's nearby painting "Cleopatra and the Asp," a mid-17th-century work by Michel Corneille.

Titian's "La Bella"
Titian's "La Bella," on display in Portland through January, has endured centuries as an intriguing mystery and a meditation on the nature of beauty.

Other paintings near "La Bella" in the museum's European galleries also reflect the changes in the art world as the culture was shifting. In the gallery adjoining the Titian are several pieces created close to Titian's time but still in a religious mode: Botticelli's 1500 devotional piece, "Christ on a Cross," painted in tempera on a small wooden cross; Lucas Cranach the Elder's 1515 "Madonna and Child With St. Catherine"; a 1521 Magdalene by the Milanese painter Giampetrino, a student of Leonardo and popularizer of the master's style; Madonnas by the 17th-century artist Bernardo Strozzi and the Italian Mannerist Angelo Boronzino, circa 1540-60. Compared with the frank secular sensuality of "La Bella," these works seem, well, cloistered.

A small portrait of a young man by Flemish artist Adrien Ysenbrant from 1520-30 shares the Titian's cosmopolitan mercantile attitude but isn't in the same league artistically. And a single painting from more than a century later -- Jean Michelin's circa-1650-60 "A Peasant Family" -- points beyond the upper classes to the slowly broadening democracy of the post-Renaissance world. Restoration work

"If you went to Florence 10 years ago to see this painting," the museum's Ferriso says of "La Bella," "you wouldn't see it like you do today."

One of the reasons "La Bella" is visiting the United States for the first time is to show off her most recent conservation, which has literally put the blush back in her cheeks.

Titian's portrait has had the good fortune over the centuries to be cleaned both regularly and carefully -- "rather than being subjected to complicated and invasive restorations, the painting has instead been the object of constant maintenance," Gabriella Incerpi writes in the exhibition catalog -- and that meticulousness has made things easier for modern conservators, who seek the least obtrusive ways to strip away the dulling effects of decades of varnish and restore a painting's original brightness and tones.

The process can be controversial, as the uproar over the gleaming new colors in the Sistine Chapel suggests: In cleaning an old work of art, do conservators also eliminate its history? As Ferriso puts it: "You don't want to strip away the pigment. On the other hand, you do want to be able to see the painting."

You can see "La Bella" -- beautifully. And, despite the restored brilliance of her colors and the immediacy of her presence, in no way as if she were born yesterday.

Up close, you can glimpse the painting's craquelure -- the tiny patterns of cracking in the oil paint as it gradually shrinks on the canvas -- but not overmuch. It ages but does not dilute the painting, which with its restoration has become not so much new as revivified, showing its age in the best possible light.